More on: Philip Terman

Did you put him
on the canvas to get one more Jew out
of harm’s way?

Like one nation divided, the older—by three minutes—bragged: We had a race, and I won. The younger would respond: We had a fight. I kicked him out. Impossible to tell them apart— in photos, in home movies— hairy and smooth in equal measures, matching clothes, thin bodies, freckled, blue eyes behind black-framed glasses— as babies,…

At the Synagogue Rummage Sale during Holocaust Remembrance Day Basement, Butler, Pennsylvania, the gentiles bargaining for old tallises, worn yarmulkes, a torn challah cover, a stained torah, a hundred thumbed copies of Anne Frank— I walk out and past a circle of bat mitzvah-aged girls and our rabbi, who stops me and asks if I’ll…

The greatest evil is when you forget that you are the son of a king. —Martin Buber, Tales of Hasidism   Yet, aren’t I the son of Joe Terman, used car salesman? And wasn’t he the son of Abraham Terman, carpenter, until injured by a salami truck, or was it a cable car, on Cedar…